Chick Operating Officer

A time management tune-up in the leadership ranks is an easy first step in tightening up operational performance.  Simply starting meetings on time will free up some cycles for productive work, and it will help establish the framework of disciplined behavior and professional courtesy necessary to support an execution-focused culture. 

Maybe your company has a deep tradition of tardiness, or perhaps the team has just gotten a little sloppy.  Either way, this is a very simple problem to solve if you’re the boss.  Just be extremely vigilant about your own timliness for awhile and operate in a mode of hyper-promptness.  Arrive for every meeting a minute or two early, and start it on the dot if you’re running it.  Don’t wait for everyone to wander into the room, and don’t make an effort to chase down missing attendees.  Likewise, be sure to end your meetings at or before the scheduled end time. 

It’s not necessary to make any kind of pronouncement.  Within a week or two at most, your team will be turning up for meetings on time.  It’s interesting to observe that even in very collegial organizations, hierarchy cues don’t get ignored when it comes to group gatherings – presumably some kind of wolf pack artifact.  If the boss is in the room, and especially if he or she is speaking, people will be loath to slink in late.   

Since time management habits trickle down from the top, the problem is much harder to solve if you work for an executive who is chronically late. Unless the individual in question is self-aware enough to want to change, your best bet is probably to collude with his or her assistant on a basic workflow solution.  Try this: ask the assistant to schedule the meetings with the most attendees into the earliest time slots in each day.  Since delays pile up as the day wears on, this will at least mathematically reduce the amount of time people spend standing around and the amount of re-scheduling required.